The rate of growth of e-commerce sales has far eclipsed the rate of growth of retail sales in recent years. As e-commerce sales continue to expand, online marketing also expands. Marketing techniques aimed at Internet searchers have become popular because they provide the ability to connect advertisers directly to consumers searching for related products.
Currently, advertisers have the capability to purchase a variety of online marketing products. Advertisers may bid in an auction or pay a set amount to an online service in order to have their advertisements displayed in response to specific search phrases entered through a user browser. As Internet searchers implement a search engine and type in a query, a delivery engine supplied by the online service is responsible for matching the user and his or her query with one or more advertisements in accordance with an advertiser bid.
To date, delivery engines have implemented a limited number of search and retrieval techniques to locate appropriate advertisement matches in response to a user query. The techniques are generally expensive, as they require the delivery engine to sort through a large number of entries in order to locate the most appropriate advertisements. Accordingly, a solution is needed that quickly and efficiently locates and serves appropriate advertisements matching a user query.